282 DEVASTATIONS AND EESTOBATIONS. 



agriculture fails to get labourers, extensive lands lie fallow, the cultivator 

 cannot give to the land what it ought to produce, and thus the soil no 

 more supports the man, and the man no longer makes the soil fertile ; a 

 vicious and fatal circle which infolds you, and the consequences of which, if 

 you do not apply a remedy, will be to make this department a desert, which 

 in a century, perhaps, having no more individual existence, will be divided 

 amongst the neighbouring departments, and deleted from the map of France. 

 " God had made your country a country of woods, of pasturage, of cattle. 

 To each country he has given its function ; this was yours. You have 

 changed it, you have uprooted the trees, you have ploughed up the turf, 

 you have sought on these steep declivities to sow rye and wheat, you have 

 run against the decrees of Providence and against the laws of common sense, 

 and you have been sorely punished ! 



" In order to prove this, I have brought before you facts of the present 

 and the teachings of history ; permit me, in closing, to interrogate science ; 

 she also will give you instruction ! 



" The turf, the trees, which in your improvidence you have destroyed, 

 retain by their roots the water of the storms. This water, of which one 

 portion was absorbed, could only flow away slowly. The rivers could not 

 enlarge and flow with the rapidity, with the violence, which makes of them 

 to-day frightful torrents. The earth retained on our mountains was not 

 carried away into the valleys ; it did not raise the bed of our streams, it 

 did not occasion their overflowing. Not only did the trees retain the water 

 and absorb a great portion of it, but more than this, they caused it to 

 penetrate to a certain depth into the soil. Their roots entering the rock 

 lying under the vegetable soil, made as it were wells in which the water 

 lost itself. 

 ' " To-day the torrents of rain have quickly carried away 20 or 30 centi- 

 metres in depth of the vegetable bed ; underneath this they find the rock, 

 and flowing over this as over a marlsle slab they carry away what earth 

 remains. Would you have a proof of this'! Run over the devastated 

 cantons and everywhere you will see the fields, newly sown, cut into deep 

 ravines ; the neighbouring fields which have not been wrought, but which 

 are covered by a dense turf, do not appear to have been ever touched by 

 the storm. It seems as if God had desired to multiply proofs, for one 

 cannot take a step on the mountain but they present themselves to the eye ! 

 " All that was in wood, all that was in turf, has been preserved ; all that 

 was sown has been out into ravines ; and it is the earths detached from the 

 mountains, it is the diluvial waters which nothing has retained, which have 

 caused all our rivulets to overflow their banks, and has converted Lozere 

 into ruins. Here even in Mende you have a providentiLil teaching. When 

 the Lot inundated all the lower part of the town, threatening with death so 

 many families, to whom it was impossible to lis for eighteen hours to give 

 succour — eighteen hours of agony ! — I heard it said, ' What will the 

 Merdanqon do? Stopped by the rise of the Lot, it will change itself into 

 a furious torrent, and it will carry away in the upper town the houses, as in 

 the lower town the Lot bears down and overturns everything in its passage.' 

 The Merdangon was au iuoflfensive rivulet, a few stones sufliced to make for 

 it the semblance of a dike, it flowed slowl}-, it did not rise more than 30 

 centimfetres, or 12 inches, it did no harm, it occasioned no disaster. 

 Why"! Because it flowed from a mountain the sides of whiyh had been 

 completely replanted with woods. 



